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Anonymous ID: 2c7174 Sept. 18, 2021, 4:13 a.m. No.14608023   🗄️.is 🔗kun

April 250 AD

 

Emperor Messius Quintus Decius issues a provision of law unique in history: Decius, sure of the support of the pagan population (and probably solicited by the Jewish bank in a moment of very serious crisis of the state treasury) issues a religious census with extended general validity to all the provinces of the empire.

 

Here is the modus operandi: the emperor of Rome requires his subjects to appear before a commission of magistrates to make a 'pagan' profession of faith.The subject is asked to drink, taste and sacrifice to the gods of imperial traditionalism. In exchange, the subject is given a libellum signed by himself: a certificate of good religious conduct, a declaration of orthodoxy

 

There were many cases of apostasy among Christians (as reported by Hippolytus, Origen, Tetrullianus), the Churches suffered a real split between the most rigorous members, the most frightened members and those who did not consider a material act emptied of spiritual meaning ("what enters the mouth is not impure but what comes out of the heart"). The reconstituted Church will also be heir to this internal fracture. Rather, there is no known defection by the Jewish communities: if I am not mistaken, it was the same ones who swore allegiance to Caesar before Pontius Pilate.

 

How did it turn out?

 

The collective madness reached paroxysm, the neighbor denounced the one next door and the pressure was greater in some provinces and less in others. The more the violence against the Christian communities was exacerbated, the more they became stronger and met new proselytes.

 

The carnage ended out of the blue ten years later with the edict of Gallienus, and resumed in legislative sobs, unexpectedly, with Diocletian, always in moments of greatest difficulty for the taxman, until it disappeared completely with the well-known Constantine I (the which implemented a disruptive financial reform that would have made the state treasury more independent from third-party agencies).Historians still struggle to explain certain correlations and above all the reason for such liberticidal regulations in the empire that is more tolerant of religious plurality.